Artist Originals

Tulip is a contemporary take on the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairytale Thumbelina. Co-directed by Andrea Love and Pheobe Wahl, the 9-minute film became an instant festival darling, being screened at Annecy and collecting an audience award at the New York International Children's Film Festival. With a nostalgic yet modern reimagining of the classic fairtyale, the narrative is infused with themes of adventure, magic, and freedom. And the stop motion animation is overflowing with bundles of care, patience, intricate detail, and—yes—wool.

The story follows Tulip, a tiny child who is born from a flower in an old woman’s garden and who eventually embarks on a magical adventure. Whereas the original Thumbelina tale dealt more in the romantic, Tulip's aim was to breakaway from this fairytale myopia in favor of more dynamic themes. In Andrea's words, "We wanted to create an adaptation that allows Tulip to be free from the traditional love-story ending and able to find home in more places than one, while maintaining the original story’s themes of risk, adventure and magic."

The Tulip production—with over 15 sets and 20 puppets—occurred entirely in Andrea’s 500 sq. ft basement studio. The goal was to create a film that brought together Andrea and Phoebe's artistic aesthetics and storytelling styles. Pre-production began at the end of July 2019, with the writing of the script and character designs. They then roughed out the entire film as an animatic—a shot by shot breakdown edited to the script. All of the talented actors recorded their lines in a voiceover studio in Vermont. Then they were able to begin the physical production process.

The puppets were constructed with foam and aluminum wire armatures. The shape of the bodies were needle-felted over the armatures, and small costumes were sewn by hand. In order to convey Tulip’s tiny size compared to the human world, Andrea & Phoebe used 3 different scales. This resulted in human puppets ranging from 3 inches tall to larger than life-size. Sets were also constructed atop rigid foam bases, using wool, felt fabric, and papier-mâché. Aside from a couple of props from the antique store, everything was made by hand. Since they were working in such a small studio with limited resources, they constructed only one set at a time, captured the animation, and then moved onto the next set.

Stop motion is created by capturing one still frame at a time with a DSLR camera, then slightly moving the puppet before taking the next photo. The sequence of photos gets strung together to create movement. Tulip was filmed at 12 unique frames per second. In order to retain the handmade aesthetic, no green screens were used. Everything you see onscreen was done in-camera. When puppets are suspended in the air, they are held up with wire rigging, which is then removed in post-production. Andrea was able to produce between 5 and 10 seconds of animation in a day, depending on the complexity of the shot. The animation was wrapped in July 2020, almost a year after beginning our journey.